


So Late Into The Night

by Katherine



Category: The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
Genre: Gen, first person POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-18
Updated: 2010-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-13 16:57:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katherine/pseuds/Katherine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the eerie green flashes from what we were told was comet debris, I could see that the triffids were all but pressed against the nearer fence.</p><p>Although it is the kind of statement made so much more easily after the fact, and thus unreliable, I will make it: the triffids were restless that night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	So Late Into The Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [radondoran](https://archiveofourown.org/users/radondoran/gifts).



I was one of the many who watched the green flashes, of course. Observing strange phenomena is, you might say, my stock-in-trade. Or was.

Since I was at the observation and research post by this triffid farm, inevitably I watched the triffids as well. They were safely corralled, but I could hear the rustling and the pattering. In the eerie green flashes from what we were told was comet debris, I could see that the triffids were all but pressed against the nearer fence.

Although it is the kind of statement made so much more easily after the fact, and thus unreliable, I will make it: the triffids were restless that night.

And in the morning...

* * *

I expect it will be a long time before I can write about that first morning with anything near to objectivity. Or, indeed, before I can write about it at all.

Although I could skip ahead, I find that I am failing at putting down my later memories also. So I will give in to my reluctance to write about the outside, and will record what might be trivia instead.

I write this in the perpetual darkness in a large, heavy hand, digging the pen-point into the paper. Even forming these words with what feels like slow nicety I wonder—I fear—that in I am in actuality producing no more than scribbling on the page.

If my account is actually readable (and how to test that other than by joining with one of the few remaining sighted, and trusting) the question arises: what do I truly intend this record to be?

There is that question, then, of what purpose my writing serves, and what writing to leave the future. Let alone the various issues of physical preservation, in this changed world with all our systems scattered and gone.

It is perhaps only the human impulse to record which sets me on this task.

I could claim that I am particularly suited to leave a record.

My years of making observations in only dim light have provided invaluable experience, a background that has given me a start on the sensory feeling of marking facts down, line by line. Here I even have the same small notebooks that were my habit to use then, a fact which gives me an uncanny idea that I might turn from my concentration now and be back to how things were.

Still, it's a very different thing to be forever in the dark, no chance to set up visually or check my work.

After that first, harrowing expedition which I find I can't yet bring myself to write of, I retreated in the building until I was behind three sets of doors. Thus placed, I spent hours (what felt like hours: telling time is another thing of difference now) bent over a small notepad, feeling each line of grease-pencil as I wrote, determining whether the lines usually waver upwards or down, and my natural spacing between them.

Even with my own intensive training of self combined with my previous experience, the writing is laborious work. I considered abbreviations, shorthand, but how can I, in conscience, add to the future's difficulty in deciphering these records I will leave behind?

So long as I continue to tell myself that I am writing for the future, instead of merely to tidy and sweep my own head...

* * *

Needing to believe I write this for a reason may be why, I must admit to myself, I have touched so little on the personal. That might be why I have kept in my own mind, rather than putting down on paper, my thoughts—concerns and imaginings are all but equivalent—for those I knew.

My assumption is this writing I do is not to form a personal record, or at least not an entirely personal one. Yet, I am not even attempting a broad scope and compiling of the knowledge I helped gain. Nearer the beginning of this effort I did consider writing in the statistics and studies of triffids. However, such tabulated data remains available—at least, it would be, will be, for those able to see the arrangement.

* * *

I wonder how many others are, like me, tucked in somewhere that is familiar from the time before. Some people may, as I do, accept that they are isolating themselves. They too may also be hiding (or are we all, anywhere, hiding in where is so dark for the majority of the race).

Conversely, many of those of us who are left alive may have joined with or established groups. No doubt as people do begin to rearrange their groupings and travel there will be more scavenging and raiding.

I do not expect this place to be raided. It was, after all, set by one of the significant triffid farms. Nor do I think anyone will consider this a place of refuge. That I do...

I retreated here for no few reasons.

Familiarity, of course, of equipment as much as of physical space. The relative isolation, and with that, placement. The knowledge of what is stored here. So much information (no matter that none of it I can now read or even sort). Supplies. Fence-building materials. Protective gloves and mesh masks. Anti-triffid guns.

I would wish the scientific equipment can be anticipated to be even a fraction as useful soon.

* * *

Much of what I did at Arctic-European should have been called behavioural studies; rightfully would have been, had anyone been willing to refer to as behaviour the responses and action of triffids.

Once I thought of writing a book on them, and it was knowledge of the huge vested interest, and my own place there, that stopped me going further than collecting information. Now that sort of interest is gone, and so too all the apparatus of sharing knowledge that way.

Thinking of the work I did, that all of us at Arctic-European did, of course has my thoughts returning to those I worked with.

Despite my efforts, I was considered even among my peers in the company to be somewhat funny about triffids. Thus I chose my confidantes carefully.

Again and again, my thoughts move to Bill Masen.

He has the more exotic pieces of information about triffids I myself told him. He will—he must—have some additional edge, if remembers those. I must hope that he believed what I told him, or at the least wondered enough, for the ideas to be memorable to him.

I wonder if he or one of the others will survive and think to come back here, or to one of the other stores of what was our knowledge of triffids.

Inevitably, man is gaining another sort of knowledge of them now. I am all too aware, from bodies literally stumbled over out there, that all must be learning the danger.

Yet we need to learn—relearn—and stay aware of so much.

* * *

Dissection revealed no recognisable mechanism by which a triffid could perceive sound, or even vibration, but they undeniably do have such a capacity. Why else their drumming of the projecting sticks—the pattering I called (if with circumspect privacy) talking. Communication must run in both directions, output and perception.

It evidently does, from triffid to triffid. I suspect it may never, between triffid and man.

I could leave what is now the most trite of warnings:

They perceive. They think. They intend to harm us—and now, could be deadly not only to each of us who is inadequately protected, but to the remains of mankind, to man's thin remaining hope of survival.

They are far better fitted for this new world than are we.


End file.
